Dissecting the Great Disruption

It's time we took the future seriously, says Mark Stevenson, author of the award-winning "We Do Things Differently" and "An Optimist's Tour of the Future".

A great wave of new technologies is engulfing our lives, threatening to disrupt economic models and social norms. It’s going to be messy. Large corporations are already struggling to adapt to the changes.

While it’s hard to predict the future, I believe we can make ourselves ready for it. We must ask the right questions, make ourselves future literate and grab new opportunities.

Technology is speeding up. In the 19th century, it took 46 years for a quarter of the US population to adopt electricity. Fast forward to the late 20th century, and it took the same proportion (of a much larger populace) just seven years to embrace the World Wide Web.

As Moore’s Law shows, computer power per dollar has increased a billion fold since 1970s. One smart phone has more processing power than the entire Apollo space programme. Things we previously thought were science fiction are now becoming real. This exponential trend is seen in many other technologies, and with it questions abound.

Renewable energy at a tipping point

Solar power has halved in price and doubled in capacity every two to five years since French inventor Augustin Mouchot unveiled a solar thermal collector at the 1878 Paris Exhibition. Globally, we are likely less than 25 years away from having all electricity being primarily generated by renewable sources. Today, Dubai is buying its solar power at third the price of a UK gas tariff. Georgetown, a city at the heart of the oil state of Texas, is approaching 100 per cent powered by renewable energy, which uses much less water than traditional power generation – a bonus in a state that is experiencing severe drought.

Fuel out of air, a multi-trillion dollar market

The techniques of harvesting carbon from the sky to create synthetic petroleum is already with us. The race is on to commercialise the process, with investors like Bill Gates backing firms such as Calgary’s Carbon Engineering. The Solar Fuels Institute predicts commercial fuel taken from the sky will be commercially available by the end of the next decade.

“The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way round.”

Air pollution kills one in every eight of us. Environmental disasters cost the global economy USD7.3 trillion a year, almost a tenth of world GDP in nominal terms. These are expensive invoices that we will have to pay at some point. The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way round. Any investment that isn’t environmentally neutral is not investment in any useful sense – it is a cost of the future.

3D printing revolution

Soon 3D printers will be able to print all the components required to make 3D printers. For instance Germany’s Nanoscribe makes precision 3D printers that can print on a scale that is 80,000 times smaller than human hair – the scale of microchip components (and yes they are printing simple examples of these already). When we democratise and distribute manufacture, innovation can blossom.

AI doctors and gene editing

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help diagnose patients better than human doctors alone. At the same time, the speed of progress in genome sequencing is outstripping Moore’s Law by a factor of four since 2008. At this rate, we will be able to map a human genome for USD1 by the end of this decade. According to Harvard University Medical School Professor George Church, the first human trial to reverse cell aging based on CRISPR-based gene editing therapies could start within two years. Our relationship with time will change as we live longer. It will force us to take climate change more seriously and think about retirement (and relationships) differently.

"Taking the future seriously will cost some people their jobs. Not taking it seriously will cost everyone their jobs.”

A Chinese proverb says: “When the wind of change blows, some build walls, others build windmills.” Technological innovation can be exciting and scary, even painful at certain times. But only by rolling up our sleeves and embracing change can we get ourselves ready for the future and reap the rewards of generational transformation. Taking the future seriously will cost some people their jobs. Not taking seriously will cost everyone their jobs. It’s your call.

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